Technical Report: Reactive Planning for Mobile Manipulation Tasks in Unexplored Semantic Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid control architecture for mobile manipulators that enables complex rearrangement tasks in unknown environments, with formal guarantees on completeness, termination, and obstacle avoidance.

Contribution

It presents a novel integration of temporal logic specifications with reactive control, allowing online adaptation to unknown obstacles and environment changes.

Findings

Proves completeness and termination under certain conditions.

Demonstrates obstacle avoidance in simulated environments.

Handles complex manipulation tasks with increased efficiency.

Abstract

Complex manipulation tasks, such as rearrangement planning of numerous objects, are combinatorially hard problems. Existing algorithms either do not scale well or assume a great deal of prior knowledge about the environment, and few offer any rigorous guarantees. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid control architecture for achieving such tasks with mobile manipulators. On the discrete side, we enrich a temporal logic specification with mobile manipulation primitives such as moving to a point, and grasping or moving an object. Such specifications are translated to an automaton representation, which orchestrates the physical grounding of the task to mobility or manipulation controllers. The grounding from the discrete to the continuous reactive controller is online and can respond to the discovery of unknown obstacles or decide to push out of the way movable objects that prohibit task accomplishment. Despite the problem complexity, we prove that, under specific conditions, our architecture enjoys provable completeness on the discrete side, provable termination on the continuous side, and avoids all obstacles in the environment. Simulations illustrate the efficiency of our architecture that can handle tasks of increased complexity while also responding to unknown obstacles or unanticipated adverse configurations.